Our Advocacy

The Trust believes that our policy submissions are key to our role as an advocate for women and girls in Victoria. The Trust submissions focus on issues which we believe go to the heart of gender equity-economic status, violence against women, discrimination, poverty, and unfair treatment under the law.

Below are submissions and letters of endorsement made by the Trust from 2015.

If you would like to know more about submissions we have made before 2015, please email our Research & Advocacy Officer casimira@vwt.org.au

Our Policy Submissions

Sexual harassment at work flourishes in places where sexual discrimination goes unchecked and full gender equality remains a distant hope. Sexual harassment is fuelled by organisations that remain overly masculine; are unequal from top to bottom; and which manifest cultures of permissiveness towards perpetrators and silencing of those harmed.

On September 27 2018, the Trust contributed a policy submission to the Victorian Government Gender Equality Bill 2018 Discussion Paper. In our submission we have chosen to address the discussion paper questions where we believe our experience as a women’s organisation can value-add to this important discussion surrounding the intention, implementation, inclusion and evaluation of the proposed legislation.

In our submission we discuss how the processes of naming electorates has systematically overlooked the achievements of women, and outline how these proposed changes fail to rectify the disparity between the representation of men and women within electoral names.

In our submission, we discuss the scourge that domestic violence constitutes in our society and the legislative and policy intervention vacuum that has persisted in Australia since federation which has ensure the deeply embedded, systemic and wicked nature of this problem.

As the non-consensual sharing of intimate images becomes easier with the advent of new technologies, it represents a serious issue concerning the safety and wellbeing of women and girls as they increasingly navigate and live their lives through online spaces.

The Trust’s submission addressed the schedules in the Bill which addressed Australia’s child care and paid parental leave (PPL) schemes.
Our submission emphasised that the benefits of a flexible and generous social security system are then manifest at every level of society with benefits reaching far into Australia’s future.

We believe Labor has a unique opportunity in Setting The Agenda to build momentum and a political appetite for bold, sophisticated and measured policies which lead to gender equality and to real and lasting and positive change.

In our submission we stated that in order to remove structural inequalities which segregate our workplace along gender lines and contribute enormously to the gender pay gap there needs to be a complete overhaul of the norms which dictate our working lives.

On 29 January 2016, the Trust submitted a policy submission to the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council on the topic of maximum sentencing penalties for sexual offences, particularly those involving a child.

Featuring Trust projects such as Vida’s Voices; Here She is!; Rosie; Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives; and Getting the Balance Right we give a number of recommendations to the Victorian Government to achieve gender equality in Victoria going forward.

Our submission highlighted that education around consent and respectful relationships was the best way to empower young people to navigate a world where the pornography is easily accessible to them and their peers.

This submission focused on the role of men in reducing attitudes which condone violence against women by adopting positive practices and attitudes to advance gender equality in their own lives and amongst their peers and family.

On 21 November, the Trust sent our endorsement of the Births, Deaths and Marriages Amendment Bill 2016 which removes the current requirement that an adult undergo sex affirmation surgery and be unmarried in order to alter the sex recorded in their Victorian birth registration to 31 Victorian Parliamentarians.

This submission draws on previous research and other initiatives undertaken by the Victorian Women’s Trust over the past decade or more to highlight the issue of young women’s levels of financial literacy and relative disengagement with the superannuation system.